Reading Diary
I pulled this off the shelf in a book store thinking it would be about Nashville's history as the capitol city of country music, but was pleasantly surprised to find it was really about how a Nashville station, WLAC, popularized black music as a radio format and brought music that had previously thrived on record and on jukeboxes onto the airwaves and coined the phrase 'rhythm and blues.' The author, Paula Blackman, is the granddaughter of one of the main players in the story, so it's a real labor of love, but what I particularly like is how she takes all this research and real history and then kind of fills in the blanks with these more novelistic scenes full of dialogue and character descriptions that may or not be strictly based in fact but don't take any overly bold liberties.
This book was published in 2020 but I'm kind of glad I wound up not reading it until this year, when there's lot of anniversary stuff for all these great records turning 40, and things covering the same material like the "We Are The World" documentary The Greatest Night In Pop. I'm a big fan of Matos and lots of his writing and his previous books and met him once, and he does a great job of immersing you in the era from so many different angles (although I think at this point he's unfollowed or muted me on every social network, go figure, he seems a little prickly, who cares). David Hepworth's 1971 - Never A Dull Moment had a similar concept and I just love this stuff, I'd love to be able to write a 'yearbook' about the music of a given year in this style -- I can think of a half a dozen years I'd want to do.
It's a little funny to see an 'authorized' biography of someone who'd died 30 years before it was written, but true to its title, Graeme Thomson spoke to just about everyone of note that he could for Cowboy Song besides the late Phil Lynott himself: other members of Thin Lizzy, Lynott's parents, many other Irish and English musicians and contemporaries. I loved getting a greater sense of how the magic of Thin Lizzy's musical evolution happened and how Lynott's unique family background informed his songwriting and his personality. But man, that last hundred pages where the band and his health are in sharp decline are just brutal to read about in detail. I try not to be too uptight or judgmental about heavy drinking and drugs, addiction is a complicated subject, but the more I dive into these stories of brilliant musicians just completely destroying themselves and dying young, especially in Lynott's generation, the angrier I get about just how commonplace it was back then, like it was almost accepted that every 4th or 5th musical genius would die before turning 40.
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